Undue Diligence

This report names some of the major banks who have done business
with corrupt regimes. By accepting these customers, banks are assisting those
who are using state assets to enrich themselves or brutalise their own people.

This corruption denies the world's poorest people the chance to
lift themselves out of poverty and leaves them dependent on aid. The report
sets out what governments, regulators and banks need to do in order to tackle
this complicity with corruption.

The world has learnt during 2008 and 2009 that failures by banks
and the governments that regulate them have been responsible for pitching the
global economy into its worst crisis in decades. People in the world's richest
countries are rightly angry at the increasing job losses and house
repossessions.

What is less understood is that for much longer, failures by
banks and the governments regulate them have caused untold damage to the economies of some of the poorest countries in the world.

This is happening despite anti-money laundering laws that
require banks to know who their customers are and what the source of their
funds is. But there are huge loopholes in the system that mean it isn't
working. Governments that regulate them have caused untold damage to the
economies of some of the poorest countries in the world.

Undue Diligence presents
evidence that:

Barclays kept open
an account for the son of the dictator of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea long after
clear evidence emerged that his family were heavily involved in substantial
looting of state oil revenues.

A British tax haven, Anguilla, and a Hong Kong
bank, Bank of East Asia, helped
the son of the president of Republic of Congo, another oil-rich African
country, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of his country's oil revenues
on designer shopping sprees. Read his credit card statements.

Citibankfacilitated
the funding of two vicious civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia by enabling
the warlord Charles Taylor, now on trial for war crimes in the Hague, to loot
timber revenues.

HSBC and Banco Santander hid behind bank secrecy laws in Luxembourg and
Spain to frustrate US efforts to find out if Equatorial Guinea's oil revenues
had been looted and laundered.

Deutsche Bank assisted
the late president Niyazov of Turkmenistan, a notorious human rights abuser, to
keep state gas revenues under his personal control and off the national budget.

Dozens of British, European and Chinese banks have provided
Angola's opaque national oil company, Sonangol, with billions of dollars of oil
backed loans, though there is no transparency or democratic oversight about how
these advances on the country's oil revenues are used, and they have a
recent history mired in corruption and secret arms deals.